How Miami Ins Office Set Up Deception

Elaborate Cover-up Attempt Was Tripped Up By Electronic Mail Messages

June 30, 1996|By ERIC SCHMITT The New York Times

WASHINGTON - — Forty-eight hours before a group of influential House members visited the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Miami operations last June, the top field managers of the agency's local district were panicking.

The main detention center in Miami, designed to hold 226 immigrants, was bursting with 407, threatening serious health and security hazards. More than 50 women slept on cots in the lobby of the center's medical clinic. Criminal detainees mixed with other immigrants, including children as young as 10.

Those conditions touched off an elaborate deception and cover-up detailed in a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, the immigration service's parent.

It was essential, the Miami immigration officials thought, to impress the seven-member delegation from Washington. With the blessing of two regional superiors, Valerie Blake, the Miami deputy district director, ordered an additional dozen inspectors on overtime pay and sent them to the airport to keep the immigration inspection lines flowing quickly.

She told inspectors not to "whine" about staffing shortages and to lie if asked whether the airport's holding cells were occupied by illegal immigrants other than criminals.

Blake also directed that 58 detainees, including several criminals, be released without screening. And, at a cost of $13,867, she ordered that 45 other immigrants be sent on buses, with packed lunches, to a county jail in Northwest Florida or to an INS center in New Orleans and that they be kept there until the legislators left.

By about 1 p.m. on the day before the visit, Kathy Weiss, the detention center's administrator, had sent Blake an urgent electronic mail message, confirming execution of the deputy director's plan for the immigrants "to be stashed out of sight for cosmetic purposes."

Forty minutes later, Blake flashed an electronic response to her lieutenant: "Great work so far."

The outline of the elaborate scheme was disclosed last week in a summary of the inspector general's report by Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., who headed a House delegation appointed by Speaker Newt Gingrich to examine immigration practices.

But a copy of the complete 197-page report, obtained by The New York Times from an official criticial of INS operations, lays out the last-minute ruses employed by top immigration officials in Miami and Burlington, Vt., site of the agency's Eastern regional office.

The report also describes how the officials were tripped up in large part by a trail of incriminating e-mail messages, some of which they had purged from their computers. The inspector general, Michael Bromwich, reconstructed the messages with the help of Lotus Development Corp.

By the time the House members arrived on June 10, 1995, the Miami operation was so transformed that Gallegly marveled at how well one of the most challenging immigration portals in the country was coping with its problems.

But the elaborately orchestrated lie, the new report says, began to unravel when nearly 50 INS employees in Miami wrote to the lawmakers after their overnight visit to tell them they had been duped. When confronted with accusations of the deception, the field managers tried to cover it up, the report says.

For example, the report blamed Carol Chasse, the agency's Eastern regional director, for approving Blake's plan and then impeding the Justice Department inquiry by failing to give investigators important e-mail messages. In 6 1/2 hours of testimony to investigators, the report says, Chasse responded to questions by saying at least 245 times that she did not know or could not recall.

Chasse last week denied any wrongdoing.

In response to the charges, the INS has transferred Chasse, Blake and two other top field managers to nonsupervisory jobs, pending a Justice Department review of possible disciplinary action and criminal prosecution. The two other managers are Chasse's deputy, Michael Devine, and Walter D. Cadman, the head of the Miami district.

In addition, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to hold hearings in late July to determine whether operational problems and similar deception exist at other large immigration centers, like the one at San Diego.

The report by Bromwich recommends disciplinary action, ranging from reprimands to dismissal, for the four transferred officials and nine others. But Bromwich reserved his most searing criticism for Blake, who was promoted late last year from her post in Miami to head of the agency's office in St. Paul. Bromwich urged her dismissal.

"The single person most responsible for orchestrating the effort to present a false picture to the task force was Valerie Blake," the report said. "But for Blake's actions, the events described herein would likely not have occurred."